The Yorkshire Ranter – Page 141 – A non-kinetic onslaught

October 18, 2009 by yorksranter 1 comment

sorry funds are not available, we’ve got you by the ballssorry funds are not available, we’ve got you by the balls

I’m surprised more people didn’t pick this up, but the Guardian quietly confirmed all the rumours about cash points and BACS payments nearly not making it through the banking crisis. Here’s the story: The Guardian has learnt that a year ago the City regulator was so concerned about customers’ fears over the soundness of RBS…

October 18, 2009 by yorksranter 0 comments

false consensus, part two

More fake consensus. “It’s like a three ring circus in here!” Here’s Chris Dillow, making the excellent point that the promises of cuts are significantly less than the average errors on forecasts of the budget balance. Here’s Samuel Brittan making the excellent point that the cure for the budget deficit is economic recovery. Here’s Economic…

October 18, 2009 by yorksranter 2 comments

Hogging the chamber

You think the attack on libertarians was troll bait? Well, this thing goes up to 11. Douglas Hogg is right, possibly for the first time in his career. Consider the great kerfuffle about MPs’ expenses. Some of them were in the habit of doing things that were within the rules but looked embarrassingly extravagant, some…

October 18, 2009 by yorksranter 0 comments

fake sheikhs

Boris Johnson is opposed to more congestion charging, but not quite yet; however, he is also keen on “road pricing”. I can see a couple of explanations for this. One is that there’s no “there” there – he’s an unstable personality without intellectual substance and with a practised TV clown act, like George W. Bush,…

October 18, 2009 by yorksranter 4 comments

that’s not noise, that’s the sound of freedom – oh, by the way, I voted Libertarian

Libertarianism, by which I mean yer bog standard comments thread North American subtype, is irrational. This struck me in the context of this post of Charlie Whitaker’s, which was of course criticised by the local libertarian in the usual terms. First of all, let’s define terms; the standard set-up of modern right-libertarian arguments is based…

October 12, 2009 by yorksranter 0 comments

WKAY progress, this weekend

No blogging this weekend, due to engineering work. Specifically, it’s quite incredible the difference between the amount of blog I can produce in an afternoon and the amount of code, which sort of bears out all the misgivings you might have about the whole blogging project. (Not that those wouldn’t have been better raised in…

October 9, 2009 by yorksranter 0 comments

nobeltrollet

I think we’ve just seen the Sistine Chapel of trolling built.

October 4, 2009 by yorksranter 0 comments

99% of readers will find this entirely meaningless

Wish us luck at 3.05 this afternoon. Keighley are in their first final since 1996, against Oldham, for the right to be refused promotion out of the second division (sorry, Co-Op Championship One – we’ve got title inflation, too). Update: Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. 28-26, after 4-6 at half time Now watch us…

October 2, 2009 by yorksranter 8 comments

a curious case

Donal Blaney has apparently taken legal action by posting this link to Twitter in reply to a second, allegedly fake “Donal Blaney” Twitter account. As you will see if you click it, however, the link actually goes to this entry on his blog. So does a further bit.ly link he posted. The post does not…

September 28, 2009 by yorksranter 2 comments

WhoseKidAreYou: Day Two

OK, we’re getting somewhere with WhoseKidAreYou. 865 hits off Hacker News. Thanks to comments, it looks like DBpedia already has a ton of data we can use – their data class Person includes a subclass Relatives, and their API uses SPARQL, so a lot of WKAY might just be a frontend to that, probably with…